Estocada

I inhale the thick cloying smoke the way he taught me to, hold it in my lungs, feel the drugs reach my neurotransmitters, drenching my brain in dopamine. I lay back and look out the window, the sky endless and blue, a perfect spring afternoon. "You know, today would have been six months clean for me," I say. I try to touch the part of me that should feel something: shame? regret? But all I feel is an aching emptiness. A void.

"I told the last person I loved that if I ever relapsed again, that was it, I'd be dead. Do drugs again and you're dead, I told myself this over and over. I know this for a fact." I say this and laugh. I watch the birds building a nest in the tree outside the window, the opiates insulating me from every feeling I don't want to feel.

We could stop, he says. His skin is warm against mine, the sunlight making tiny rainbows on the ceiling as it refracts through the window glass. His breathing is slow and for a moment I think of waking up next to him in bed one morning, finding him dead and cold, rigid, eyes fixed unmoving towards nothingness. 

"I don't want to stop. I don't ever want to not be high again" 

He smiles and stretches out his limbs, languid like a kitten at rest. He pulls me towards him. And I fall, dizzyingly, into oblivion.